The election is over, and from the sound of all the major news networks, so is the Conservative movement.

Call me an optimist if you wish but I find that to be a laughable proposition. Largely, I think this because everyone is in post-election meltdown mode.

Democrats are hailing the victory as the cementing of “Obama’s America.” Conservatives are distraught over the fact that voter turnout didn’t favor them as we all had predicted, and at the idea that there aren’t as many of us out there as we thought.

The right is searching for the answer to a question we never thought we’d have to ask. How could we lose to a President with such a weak record?

While I don’t have a simple answer to that question, I can offer hope for the conservative disenchanted among us.

Now brace yourselves, because I’m going to do something rarely done. I’m going to compare Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan.

In 1984, Ronald Reagan won the popular vote by about 17,000,000 votes. He won the electoral college with the incomprehensible margin of 525-13. Were Democrats forever wiped of the face of the earth to never again regain power?

Of course not.

They maintained control of Congress, and less than 8 years after that Presidential shellacking, a Democrat President was sitting in the oval office.

8 years to come back from 17,000,000 votes.

By contrast, Barack Obama narrowly defeated Mitt Romney by less than 3,000,000 votes with a much larger electorate.

On Tuesday night, we lost an election. Nothing more.

I’m not saying Obama is the Democrat Reagan. I’m not saying Mitt Romney is Walter Mondale. What I am saying is come back off the ledge. We suffered a defeat, but it certainly is not one that we’re incapable of coming back from.

In the athletic arena, I was taught something very early on about defeat, and it rings just as true in the political arena. “There’s only one good thing about losing. You learn where you are weak, so that you may become strong.”

At this time, I’m not going to get into all things I’ve learned from this election, but there are many. So while you’re at home thinking about how things have gone wrong, how we all feel as though we’ve been dealt a bad hand, remember the one good thing about losing.

Don’t waste this loss. Use it, and let’s build a stronger Conservatism.

But to carry your analogy further, the reason the Democrats came back was Tip O’Neil. He didn’t go down without a fight.

In order for us to come back, we need a Speaker of the House with balls who can stand up to media.

If I were Speaker, I would say to the president, “Balanced Budget, or else no money.”

And then, I would wait. No budget, nothing. If the government shuts down, fine.

In fact, come to think of it, there is nothing that says the Republicans can put Newt Gringrich back in during the next Congress as Speaker. It is not an elected office and doesn’t require a seat in the House to be Speaker.

Also, look at the growth of non-MSM media (like this site) over the last few years, the growing number of people who have come to realize that Obama (and ever more government) is the problem, not the solution. My way of looking at it – more people changed to our way of thinking than ever before, it just wasn’t enough yet. I wonder how the election would have gone had it been held on December 6.

In 4 years, there’s not going to be any way Dems can blame Bush (they will, but people aren’t going to buy it). The economy will still be in the tank, etc.

Our next primary items:
1) Senate
2) keep/grow House majority
3) keep on growing Conservative leaders across the nation – one of them will be the one to pick up the torch in 2016.

Goldwater was defeated, but he inspired Reagan.
What we need to do is to celebrate our status of freedom-loving minority. Celebrate our ideals, our exceptionalism. Have fun. Don’t feel let down by defeats. Point out that most people everywhere prefer security to freedom. Not us. Make it exiting to join our movement.

Exactly! We have to pick up the tools of the left and use them to our advantage: persistence and incrementalism.

And from what I can gather from a few callers on Rush’s show today, 100% acceptance and support for whoever the candidate happens to be. No “not conservative enough” or “doesn’t agree with me 100%” crap; nothing but complete support. This goes double for the old school Repubs in Congress.

Start thinking about 2014 and 2016 now! Total war, trench warfare, you name it. It is what they do, and it is what we must do. Nice guys finish last. There is plenty of time for that AFTER we win!

As Dennis Prager constantly reminds us: We have to better articulate what Conservatism is and why it is superior to Leftism in supplying what is best for the people of this country and ultimately the world. We need to change the demographics and not let them change us. I also think our worst enemy is the press that went out of its way to protect this incompetant president in inverse proportion to how they went to subvert George W. Bush.

Right, OK. So we just give up and wait for the Storm Troopers to come get us.

47% includes conservatives on SS and unemployment. Mitt wasn’t very good and still got 48%.

People can be persuaded and changed. In the 1970s, the Dem-Repub gap was huge (6 or 7) points. They told Reagan no one would buy conservatism. Reagan won 50% in a 3-way race in 1980, then 58% in 1984. The media was stunned: “Not a mandate” they said, but charisma: for some reason Americans like Reagan, and it was, like, a popularity vote. Uh-huh.

Well…think back to how Romney went “scorched earth” on most of his opponents during Primary season. Many, including the (few and far between) fair-minded Romney cheerleaders worried about potential General Election harm from such divisive brutality.

Recall how upset a lot of Cain/Perry/Newt/Santorum conservatives were. Many vowed never to vote for Romney.

Those of us here got over it. But there were probably a whole lot who didn’t. That may be your gap.

Cain and Perry supporters were angered in by Romney’s “RINO-standard” scorched-earth campaign against conservatives. Gingrich held off for a long time until he had to respond or get out, and Romney was much nastier than Santorum.

Everyone with a shred of objectivity noted the divisiveness of Romney’s campaign. Yes, everyone should have voted regardless, but…human nature: don’t count on people to “do the right thing,” even in extremis, when you run a surpassingly ugly campaign against their guy, then pretend he doesn’t exist when he wants to help you in the General.

The painful irony is that Obama did to Romney what Romney did to Gingrich. How he allowed that to happen is beyond me.

Romney won the Rep nomination with an assist by the MSM & Fox by burying the opposition with negative ads. He did not win the primaries with a positive message.

During the summer, no even before the summer while the primaries were still on, Romney was buried by negative ads from Obama. During this period Romney did not offer a positive message. I think I read one Republican political consultant state that money spent on ads before the convention are wasted, so they did not spend money on ads.

The convention comes, but is overshadowed by a hurricane. Not much of substance happens during the convention anyways. The convention does not offer a agenda, but does offer a parade of pretty faces.

The debates come and they are surprising because Romney actually does offer a positive agenda, which he has never spoken of prior. Too little too late. For many people who never see the debates, all they know of Romney is what they saw on Obamas negative ads. When Romneys ad people do try to get their message out, it is too little too late. (and overshadowed by depress the vote horse race coverage and another hurricane).

Romney was a good candidate with a good message, but he never really tried to get that message out even back when the primaries were still on and he had the chance.

Turnout was probably depressed by two strategies used by both campaigns. First, almost all the ad buys were local to the swing states. The last weekend I saw only one national ad- I have NFL Sunday ticket and Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama was on every game I watched that weekend. Otherwise if you lived in 35 of the 50 states it was hard to tell there was a presidential election this year.

Second. both campaigns went negative. This is known to turn off independents who prefer to vote for someone instead of against the greater evil. At one point it was rumored Romney was thinking about doing what Obama did in ’08- buy a 30 minute block on each network the final weekend to a positive message. After Sandy I bet he wishes he had done it.

There are a couple observations that I saw personally in the runup to the GOTV on Tuesday:

1) The GOP’s GOTV “machine” is pathetic. People are barraged by calls. When a person votes, they still get called multiple times. That turned off a number of people especially in swing states. When the NC call center switched to calling people in Colorado, we cheered when we got a polite respondent. The technology needs an overhaul and the GOP needs to identify and target its supporters using big data and big data analytics to a far greater degree.

2) I called several people who were angry at Romney for being “rich”. Multiply these people over all the supporters we couldn’t connect with and you’ve got a turnout problem for sure. Imagine – reliable GOP base supporters who bought into the opposition messaging. You’ve got to acknowledge the power of the media and popular culture. We really have to fight it and somehow mitigate its influence.

3) A lot of the reliable GOP base is OLD. I mean, too old to get to the polling place. Infirm and tired. I just despaired at the demographics. Where are the young people who are our supporters? The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. And as a great article over at the American Thinker stated “even when conservatives won elections, the people who lost those elections taught our children the next day.”

4) Middle and upper middle class citizens have bought into the Democrat’s cultural message and that cultural message trumps their own economic well being. Frankly, now that Obamacare is not going to be repealed, it trumps their *Physical* well being as well. It doesn’t matter, like in Canada, it will take 15-20 years for the great American medical system to decay to the squalor of Europe and Canada. It’s cold comfort to know that they are just as much of a number to a “death panel” than I am. But the culture matters even more than economics.

5) Like it or not, Mormonism was an issue to some in the core Republican base. I recall my wife was very happy to have convinced an older lady to go out and vote because she wasn’t sure about a Mormon in the White House. I can’t understand this, but this was real. My wife got to one of them. How many others just stayed at home because of religious beliefs.

6) I have long thought it was a mistake not to elect a fighter as our standard bearer. We only seem to know how to politely lose. I go back to Seth Godin who writes a great blog on marketing. He has developed a marketing model he calls the Seinfeld Curve. Godin says:

“I call it ‘The Seinfeld Curve’. At one one of the curve is free – that’s Ubiquity. With Jerry Seinfeld you can watch him anywhere in the country, all day for free on TV. At the other end is scarcity, that’s $200 to go to Vegas to watch him live in concert. He wins at both ends. But in the middle is death. In the middle nobody is going to spend $4 for any Jerry Seinfeld experience that he could deliver. The challenge for musicians is that it’s all in the $4 range right now – there’s no free and there’s no scarce, it’s all in that horrible dead zone. The opportunity is to go one way or the other or probably both.”

His point is that you need to differentiate in order to be successful. To the extent the Republicans do not offer a significantly different vision than the democrats, they will never pull disaffected conservatives and libertarians back into a winning coalition. To the extent we won’t fight for it, we are Osama’s “weak horse” to the Democrat’s “strong horse”.

The last point I want to make is this. The Republicans will never be in a stronger position than they are in in December 2012. They will keep getting eaten away and eaten away at as the electorate inexorably tilts left. The only weapon we have to break out of this political “kill box” is the budget cliff and the debt ceiling limit. If we cut a deal, we are done for a generation. Congressional Republicans need to hold firm on not raising the debt ceiling and allow sequestration and the expiration of the tax cuts hit. The only way out is to accelerate the system crash and get to the inevitable austerity measures quickly. Even though this is like calling for artillery fire on our own position, we are getting overrun. In that situation, we’ve got to take some chances to try to beat the attack back and get the situation more to our advantage.

I keep hearing about how conservatives need to get the message out better and convince more voters – and more ‘groups’ created by the liberals (single women, blacks, Latinos – you know all those who have a faux-war against them) of the benefits of conservative leadership. But I wonder if the fundamentals are not already there. What the Democrats did well this time as most often they do, is the ability to do better than the GOP at getting voters to the polls. Counts were lower all around. The Dems just did a good enough job at making groups feel aggrieved and enticing and in some cases transporting more them to vote.

However, we keep seeing how many across the country selectively agree with components of conservative and libertarian views. They just didn’t vote. Why not? There is the key.

Everyone described this as a “turn out” election. The Romney campaign made huge leaps in voter identification & targeting over previous Republican campaigns, but the leap did not land the campaign at the starting line the Obama campaign was working with. This Slate.com article gives the details. Today, Sean Trende’s piece at RCP also talks about the “microtargeting gap.” The good news is that, with up-to-date data mining & targeting capabilities, effective messages can appeal to many, even in minority communities. And help turn out our voters. Six million didn’t vote, we’re told.

its so simple I fail to see why people do not get it.
some lazy a$$holes voted themselves the ability to stay lazy a$$holes thereby creating more lazy a$$holes.
stop prevaricating.
it will not get better.
we went past the tipping point.
it is now time to go scorched earth.
the only way we will ever fix it is if we hit rock bottom.
you don’t fight cancer by standing around looking stupid. you almost (literally) kill yourself to kill those cells.
the only way this country will ever turn around is if it tanks and people start dieing of starvation.
it will be the only way they will learn that stupidity kills.
when someone has to cut wood or grow a garden literally to survive, they will learn what it means to have free loaders stealing from them.
and anyone who thinks I am wrong needs to step back look again.
all this whining about numbers, messages, etc is foolish.
we crossed the tipping point.
repeat that to yourself over and over.
we crossed the tipping point.

This is why the first thing House needs to do is LET THE BUSH TAX RATES EXPIRE.

The 47% is the 47% instead of the 35% because of the ultra progressive nature of the Bush tax rates. The Rich got a 3% tax rate cute, but everybody else got much bigger cuts. Obama says he wants to keep the Bush rates for everybody but the rich, but that just makes a bad problem worse.

yup. I have friends that will not believe these cuts helped them.
you show them the figures and they refuse to believe it.
so they all have to expire. and they are the obama tax cuts really.
he accepted and carried on with them, let him take the blame too.
their expiration will hurt me and the wife a lot.
its got to happen.

The vaunted ORCA GOTV effort was a miserable failure as we turned out no more than voted for McCain, perhaps well less after the totals are in.

Obama was not appealing to the middle, he was working on identifying his base voters and non-voters, assembling information about them in a database, and targeting email & etc. to their personal concerns. Young single working women got one email, black college students got another, Latino construction workers another, each designed to scare or attract that individual into turning out for Obama.

Scary, maybe, but it worked very well. If the RNC doesn’t start building a similar system right away, we may have more problems in 2016.

Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama. One movement or idea didn’t lose to another movement or idea. Another Republican running (some as yet unknown one who had/has personal ability and courage and passion to enunciate freedom) totally different result.

You need to remember that Obama borrowed $5 trillion to fund his re-election and put it on our tab. He bought UAW support with the GM and Chrysler bail-outs, he bought public sector union support by targeting stimulus money at them, an so on.

That money was never intended to help the economy; it was all used to help re-elect Obama.

But, in our drive to satisfy a human need (make things rational), we are often leaping to WRONG conclusions with BAD assumptions and incomplete data.

As Estragon (above) notes, the Obamic Machine made an art-form out of “divide and conquer”. She suggests we should emulate.

While “you can’t argue with success”, there is a powerful tenet in Conservative philosophy that makes that hard for us. We LOVE the idea that this should be a united nation, based on…and working for…equality of opportunity under law and general good faith toward all.

More personally, I don’t want to try to scare anyone, or drive them to vote AGAINST someone or some idea on imaginary self-interest…

In 2014 20 Democrat Senate seats will be at stake, Four are in red states -NC, LA, AR & SD. Several are in swing states. Three are held by Senators older than Methuselah, including the then 90 year old Frank Lautenberg. One is Al Franken’s seat. Even some Minnesota Democrats cringe at thoughts of him. Of the 13 GOP seats only one, Maine, is in a blue state.

Turnout will be down. Two groups the Democrats rely on traditionally have little interest in off year elections- students and urban singles. They pretty much stayed home in 2010.

You can’t predict a candidate will insert foot in mouth. You CAN predict someone who lost a statewide race before is at a disadvantage the second time around. Nor is it a good idea to drag someone out of retirement. In 2010 Rossi, Raese, and O’Donnell had lost statewide before and lost again. In 2012 Allen, McMahon and Raese(!!!!) had lost before and Thompson was dragged out or retirement. They all lost. Don’t blame the Tea Party for only 45 seats in the Senate. Blame politicians who don’t accept the prior verdict of the voters in their states.

The 77 year old Jay Rockefeller will be up for reelection in West Virginia in 2014. If John Raese is even thinking about running run for the Senate again will somebody please take this idiot out of our misery! He has lost four US Senate races and one primary for governor.

Elections have consequences and as 2 of the links below show some people will lose their jobs while Obama keeps his. A vegas employer fired 22 employees and Boeing will lay off who knows how many people. And then there is sequestration. In some ways I didn’t understand why Northern Virginians supported Obama without knowing exactly where he stands on it since Northern Virginia is filled with government employees and government contractors and some of those jobs are at risk. Perhaps these people have always been lucky and can’t imagine they could lose employment like the 23 million who are currently unemployed.

We need to consciously build our own culture. The arts are the foundation,the social adhesive of every culture in history. We need to encourage Conservative Fine and Popular Arts. This is beginning to happen in film; Atlas Shrugged etc, and in Music: Big Dawg Music Mafia for example… There are actually sculptors, painters, photographers etc.who are politically conservative, yes we actually exist, and some of us are very good. But we are despised by the left and ignored by the right. Real Cultural depth is the key to long term development.

The main reason not to be demoralized is that Americans over 30 voted for Romney or conservatism, and not for Obama. We’re winning the adults.

The problem is younger people who are drawn to Democrats’ generous promises and celebrity endorsements. Those are tough to beat with people who have limited life experience. I thought the last 4 years would convince them how wrong-headed these policies are. Apparently they need 4 more years of a bad economy and few jobs to really get the message.

Since they don’t have real jobs yet, they don’t pay much in tax. They are also still usually being subsidized by parents.

My neighbor is about to kick his 19 year old kid out of the house,job or not. On a different site someone said no more handouts for his slob of a socialist sister. If you are enabling someone who spits on your values cut them off. NOW. Keep them cut off until they learn their lesson or can pay their own way.

We have nurtured a generation of Blanche DuBois clones, out of touch with reality but certain of their own superiority. Let them demand the kindness of strangers and see how they like the result.

The people have spoken, we should let the Democrats give them what they voted for, good and hard, as Mencken put it. The Republican House leadership should publicly state that though they think it will harm America, they will vote in favor of any legislation introduced by the Democrats because (said in a sonorous and serious tone) the people have spoken. Let the Bush tax cuts expire, rich folks can afford them a lot more than middle income and poor folks can. Let Obamacare be instituted with vigor. Let the Democrats keep borrowing more and more money and expand the size and scope of the government.

If we have the strength of our convictions as conservatives, then we should trust that if Democrats have power, it will be bad for the country. Let’s give them the power. Supercharge the bus that they are driving over the cliff. As I said, make it clear to Americans that we think it’s a terrible idea, but this is what they voted for.

Hopefully, when Americans see the Dems’ failures they’ll change course. After this year’s election I’m not very hopeful. If it ruins the country and leads to war, well, the people have spoken.

The truth is that we can’t build a stronger conservatism. That war is lost. The Catholic church used to say, regarding parochial schools, ‘give us a child at seven and we’ll make him a Catholic for life’. Well, we’ve given the left via the educational system our children for two generations now.

Without deeply changing our schools, the slide towards Greece or Argentina is inevitable. Since leftists control the entire educational establishment from your neighborhood elementary school to universities’ ed schools I don’t see any change within the next generation. Of course, even if we change the schools’ leftist tilt, we won’t see results for another generation.

I worked the polls on election day, and though it was the busiest election in years, I kept hearing people say the same thing. They weren’t talking about Libya, or the economy, (I’m not talking about the Conservatives here just the general voting public. The fence sitters, and Dems.) They were talking about how good it was to see Obama taking charge of the clean up after Sandy. They were talking about Romney taking away their right to kill their children in the womb. They weren’t voting on saving America, they were voting on cultural issues. While we laughed at their Big Bird antics, and there binder outrage, and there birth control worries the Dems where gaining points. We forgot how base the Dem. base and many of the undecideds really are. We thought that because we were concerned about the economy, everyone would be. They weren’t, and they voted culture. Why, because when the Dems were on TV saying we would take away Big Bird and there right to have all the sexual escapades they could have without consequence we said nothing. We left the idea hang out there. What we should have done was laugh at what they were saying. Bring it down to the basic’s. Something like, “Yeah, there worried about Big Bird keeping his job but not you losing yours” Or, in the words of the Rev. Wright, looks like the Dems, chicken has come home to roost.” You get the idea. Or they might have said, “Can they really think your so dumb that you’ll believe their lies. We have more respect for you then that.”
A little more of that and a little less seriousness, in this day and age would go a long way. It’s all the other side knows. Remember where they get most of their news. From a comedy show.

I know what you are saying. I heard a young woman say the other night that she wanted to vote for Romney but the Planned Parenthood thing was too important. I shuddered at the utter stupidity. I wonder how she’ll feel when her hours get cut by the end of the year due to the health care regulations?

I hope you’re right professor. And to what you’ve said I’ll add this: the GOP needs to learn to stand shoulder to shoulder with their candidates and stop tearing them down when there’s some minor blurb or flaw discovered, like Akin’s clumsy remark. Deflect from that and draw attention back to the opponent and the bigger issues. Not pile on, pull funding, and ultimately kill that candidate’s chances! They must think of the big picture and learn to go on the offensive. Like you said, they need to look at what actually lost them this election—they let the media choose the narrative over and over and they never answered that. They never went on the attack. They should have hammered the media and Ocommie on his economic record and what it has meant. With the exceptions of AFP and AC, I never saw an ad from Romney’s campaign that really hit on how bad this economy has been made by progressive policies until very late in the campaign. This is war and they simply didn’t fight the right way. It’s something that continues to frustrate us out here in the hinterlands. We see it happening, we’re screaming for them to fight, and they never do. This was the Chicago thug political machine. You simply cannot dance around the issues. So hopefully they’ll finally understand what they need to do. They need to field strong, truly conservative candidates who can accurately articulate what that means. The left and media are going to call whoever our candidate is an extremist anyway so don’t let that fear translate in to a middle of the road candidate. As one other column said, we’ve seen over the last few decades that centrist GOP candidates don’t really do all that well (Dole, GHWB, McCain, and now Romney). When I was teaching public school years ago some of my kids would try to use the “you’re racist” tactic to get out of a consequence when they were clearly in the wrong. I learned quickly to not back down and you know what? These kids ended up respecting me because they could trust that I wasn’t easily manipulated. They knew they were in the wrong. If I had caved then the downward spiral would have been set and I would have had no control. I think the GOP needs to understand this tactic because I see the DNC and liberal media using it all the time. Do not be cowed…stick to your prinicples and get the message out why proggie policies are bad. The LSM won’t be any help so get creative on how to do it. It may well already be too late. We’re small business owners and have watched things deteriorate since 2009. Pray for our country and the strength to carry on and survive.